Search Widget that Returns 1- or 2-line Excerpt List

  • I need a search widget that will not return whole posts, but instead a list of page titles followed by short excerpts, at most two lines each. Sometimes I need to search for something and it’s the 40th return down, and so scanning several pages of whole posts is tiresome and prohibitively time-consuming.

    I have searched everywhere I can think of to find such a widget, but can’t come up with a single workable one. I visited the WordPress page on “Creating a Search Page,” but despite following the instructions as best I could, I failed to produce a workable page.

    Isn’t there a widget by now that does this? Surely I’m not the only one who wants this…

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Thread Starter blogd

    (@blogd)

    Hmm… I’m beginning to get the feeling that this kind of thing just doesn’t exist…

    I visited the WordPress page on “Creating a Search Page,” but despite following the instructions as best I could, I failed to produce a workable page.

    What was the page named?
    Where did you put it?

    What did or didn’t work as expected?

    Thread Starter blogd

    (@blogd)

    The page is titled “Creating a Search Page“; the theme I am using has no specific search.php or other search page. I tried to follow the instructions, and got at least two big errors when the page displayed at the end of the process; that was days ago and I have since trashed the page, giving it up as being far more than a simple fix or two away from making it work. I imagine that this was due to the fact that the Codex page suggested using the existing “page.php” file, and I am coming to think that the theme I chose to work from was coded by a poor programmer; so little seemed to jibe between what I was asked to modify and how to modify it.

    Really, isn’t there something that doesn’t require (a) intermediate-to-advanced coding skills and (2) a lengthy, multi-step trial-and-error process? Nobody has a pre-made template available, or god forbid a widget that gives a list instead of full-post pages?

    Seriously, I never saw a search engine before that didn’t cut the results down to excerpts. Why is this so impossible to find in WordPress? Do people really prefer to click through a dozen pages of full posts instead of getting a quick, summarized list?

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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